Let Me See What They Did to Jesus Today

Samatra and I were in the car when she started telling me about what she had been reading in Scripture that morning. The day before, she had left off around Judas’s betrayal of Jesus. Judas had conspired with the chief priests, betrayed Jesus, and then, after realizing what he had done, tried to return the money. Their response was essentially, What does that have to do with us? You deal with it. That’s obviously my paraphrase, but that’s where she had left the story.

Then she told me the thought she’d had the next morning before she picked up where she’d stopped: “Let me see what they did to Jesus today.”

I looked at her and started laughing. There was something about the way she said it that sounded almost childlike, like she had been watching a story, had to stop in the middle of it, and couldn’t wait to get back the next morning to find out what happened. She looked at me and said, “No, it’s like a journey.” That made me laugh too, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized she was describing something that was actually pretty meaningful.

She had been following Jesus through the story. She was upset by what Judas had done and by the response of the chief priests, and she had become invested in what she was reading. When she came back the next morning, she wasn’t simply continuing with the next day’s assigned passage. She wanted to know what happened next. More than that, knowing Samatra and some of the things she’s said outside of this particular conversation, I know there is a desire behind her reading to know Jesus more deeply and intimately. That morning, it just happened to come out as, “Let me see what they did to Jesus today.”

As I thought about it, I realized there was something in her response that I recognized in myself, even though I probably wouldn’t have expressed it the same way. I’ve been reading through the New Testament and am currently in the second chapter of Revelation. Somewhere along the way, I’ve noticed a change in the way I’m approaching Scripture.

There was a period when I read because I knew I needed to read. “Obligation” doesn’t quite feel like the right word, because I don’t mean that I resented reading Scripture or that I was simply checking something off a list. I knew God’s Word mattered, and I knew I needed to spend time in it, so I did. There is nothing particularly wrong with that, but what I’ve noticed lately is that something about my desire has changed.

I find myself wanting to understand what I’m reading. I want to know why something was said the way it was, how one passage connects with another, what was happening around a particular statement, and whether there is something I’ve overlooked because I’ve read the passage too quickly before. Sometimes something doesn’t make sense to me and, rather than simply moving on, I want to stop and dig into it. The farther I’ve made it through the New Testament, the more questions I seem to have and the more I want to understand.

Samatra and I are both analytical people, although we don’t always process things the same way. What caught my attention that morning was the joy and almost childlike anticipation in the way she was experiencing what she was reading. She was genuinely bothered by what was happening to Jesus, but at the same time she couldn’t wait to get back to the journey. My curiosity tends to send me digging into context, connections, words, and questions. Hers, at least in that moment, sounded more like wanting to stay close to Jesus and keep following what was happening to Him.

As different as those responses were, they brought me back to a word I had spent quite a bit of time thinking about before: delight.

That thought took me back to Psalm 119. When I was studying Psalm 119 while working through From Aleph to Tav, one of the things that repeatedly stood out to me was the psalmist’s relationship with God’s Word. Throughout the psalm, he doesn’t merely acknowledge God’s Word as authoritative or something he is supposed to obey. He talks about loving it, longing for it, meditating on it, and delighting in it.

“Oh how I love your law!
It is my meditation all the day.” — Psalm 119:97

A few verses later he writes:

“How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!” — Psalm 119:103

I remember studying passages like those and praying, Lord, I want that. I wanted that kind of desire for God’s Word for myself. I also remember thinking about the people who would eventually read From Aleph to Tav and wanting the same thing for them. I didn’t simply want someone to spend twenty-two days learning more about Psalm 119. My hope was that spending that time in the psalm might cause them to desire God’s Word more.

I hadn’t connected that prayer with what has been happening in my own reading until I started processing Samatra’s comment. I don’t want to turn this into an article about answered prayer or make more of that connection than I know, but I couldn’t help wondering whether some of what I’m experiencing now might be the beginning of an answer to something I prayed for back then. I asked God to give me a greater desire for His Word, and somewhere along the way I’ve found myself increasingly wanting to understand it, dig into it, and come back for more.

Maybe that’s part of why Samatra’s comment stayed with me. Her desire and mine don’t necessarily look the same. Hers that morning sounded like, “I want to see what happens next.” Mine often sounds more like, “I want to understand this. I want to go deeper. I want to know more.” I don’t think either experience gives us a definition of what it means to delight in God’s Word, and I certainly don’t think our experiences should become a standard by which someone else measures their relationship with Scripture.

Psalm 119 itself keeps me from making it that simple. The same psalmist who speaks about loving and delighting in God’s Word also speaks from places of sorrow, affliction, waiting, and the need to be strengthened. So delight doesn’t seem to mean that every time we open Scripture we are overflowing with excitement or that every passage immediately captures our attention. There are passages that draw us in quickly and others we struggle to understand. There are probably seasons when desire feels very present and others when we continue reading simply because we know God’s Word is worth returning to.

Still, I wonder if delight in God’s Word sometimes looks more ordinary than I have imagined it. Maybe we recognize it when we realize we’re still thinking about something we read yesterday, or when one question sends us looking at another passage because we want to understand the connection. Maybe it’s finishing what we intended to read and continuing because something has our attention. Samatra’s comment made me wonder whether the way we experience that desire may simply look different. I tend to start digging into the details, while she found herself caught up in the journey and wanting to keep following Jesus through the story.

That’s really all Samatra’s comment caused me to notice. I started out laughing because my wife woke up wondering what they were going to do to Jesus that day. By the time I had sat with it for a while, though, I found myself thinking about Psalm 119, an old prayer, my own changing relationship with Scripture, and what it might actually mean to delight in God’s Word.

I don’t know that I have a neat answer. Maybe the better questions are whether I am beginning to want God’s Word rather than merely knowing that I need it, whether that desire is drawing me toward knowing God more deeply, and whether I would even recognize delight when it shows up differently than I expected.

The next time Samatra says, “Let me see what they did to Jesus today,” I’ll probably still laugh. I hope I do. That’s part of what made the moment memorable in the first place. But I think I’ll also hear something in those words that I didn’t hear the first time: the simple desire to open the Bible again and continue the journey.

And maybe that’s worth paying attention to.

…just a thought.